Monthly Overall Search Volume Grows 5%

May 3, 2010

Month-over-month overall search volume grew 5.3% in March 2010, according to data from Compete.

Google Gains Web Search Volume, Loses Share
Search market leader Google continued to hold a commanding lead on the web search market in March 2010, holding 73.8% market share. This was a decline from 74.5% market share in February 2010, but an increase from 71.4% in March 2009.

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Google’s web query volume was 10.36 billion during March 2010, a 4.3% increase from 9.93 billion in February 2010 and a 7% improvement from 9.68 billion in March 2009.

Yahoo came in a distant second with 12.4% market share, flat from February 2010 but significantly down from 16.4% in March 2009. Yahoo’s web query volume rose 5.8% from 1.65 billion to 1.75 billion month-over-month, but dramatically declined 23.2% from 2.23 billion year-over-year.

The third- through fifth-ranked web search query market leaders in terms of market share, Microsoft, Ask, and AOL, saw little change in their month-over-month or year-over year market share percentages, except for Microsoft’s year-over-year share increasing from 8.8% to 11.1%.

All Search Market Results Similar
Measuring all search queries, including search queries performed in other dedicated search categories such as maps, travel, shopping, etc., the overall results are similar, although market leader Google is a tad less dominant.

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Google held a 68.9% share of the total search market in March 2010, down from 71% in February 2010. Google had 11.3 billion total queries, up 3.4% from 10.9 billion the prior month.

Yahoo came in second with 17.4% market share, up from 15.9% month-over-month. Yahoo had 2.8 billion total queries, up a significant 16.5% from 2.4 billion total queries in February 2010.

In addition to losing some market share to Yahoo, Google also lost a fraction of a percentage point in the total search market share to third-place Microsoft, whose share hopped from 10.3% to 10.7% month-over-month. Microsoft’s total search query volume rose 11.5%, from 1.58 billion to 1.76 billion. Ask and AOL rounded out the top five search providers in this category with flat or near-flat market share performance, although AOL’s month-over-month volume grew 22.8%.

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March 2010 Search Rankings Change Little from February
Americans’ usage preference for online search engines changed little between February and March 2010, according to data from both The Nielsen Company and comScore.

Google Search maintained its comfortable lead in search engine usage during March 2010, with 6.39 billion searches, or 65.7% of 9.72 billion total searches, according to Nielsen. Yahoo Search came in a distant second with 1.3 billion searches, or 13.4% of the total. MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search followed with 1.2 billion searches, or 12.2% of the total.

comScore’s core search rankings use different metrics than Nielsen’s search rankings, but produced similar results in March 2010. There was little change in comScore’s market share statistics of the five leading US online search providers between February and March 2010. Google Sites led the core search market with 65.1% market share, down from 65.5%. Yahoo Sites slightly rose from 16.8% to 16.9% market share. Microsoft Sites also grew slightly from 11.5% to 11.7% market share. Ask Network and AOL LLC Network’s market share rankings remained virtually unchanged in the low single digits.

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